Matthew Sumida: Adventure City

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Adventure City

After a particularly hard week, the weekend was a welcomed relief. Matthew was his sweet, funny and happy self. Sunday we met friends at Adventure City for an afternoon of fun in the crazy heat.

If there are animals around, Matthew wants to see them....no matter how bad they smell!

Special friends.....

Great afternoons with great friends...what could be better?

Initially Matthew didn't want to ride the roller coaster but after awhile he changed his mind and went twice. It would have been three times but Mark was so done!

That look of sheer delight!

Matthew loves to end the day at Adventure City by playing in the train yard. He had so much fun and was in a great mood. He had moments of difficulty but overall was such a good boy. I feel badly because too often I dwell on the negative instead of recognizing how hard Matthew has worked and how far he has come.
I am so proud of you Matthew and love you so much. You are my joy and I am so blessed to be your mom!
XOXOXOXOXO

2 comments:

Ms. to u said...: Too bad Matthew never gets out and has fun! :); September 28, 2009 at 2:48 PM
Unknown said...: Way too cute.; September 30, 2009 at 12:46 PM

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Matthew Dean

We started this blog because we wanted to be able to keep our loved ones up to date on Matthew and the wonderful progress he is making. It has been a crazy time since receiving Matthew's diagnosis of moderate to severe Autism in February 2007.
Autism is classified by the World Health Organization and American Psychological Association as a developmental disability resulting from a disorder of the human central nervous system. It is considered to be a neurodevelopmental disorder. It typically begins before 3 and is lifelong. It is characterized by varying degrees of impairment in verbal & non verbal communication skills, social interactions, and restricted, repetitive & stereotyped patterns of behavior. Children w/autism often fail to respond to their name, are unable to speak or have delayed speech and often avoid eye contact. They tend to engage in repetitive movements like rocking, spinning, hand flapping and in self-abusive behavior such as biting or head-banging. All behaviors that Matthew was exhibiting regularly. At the time we sent letters to our loved ones, we described what autism was and that there was no cure for autism. Well...... that is not the case. You can recover from autism and to that end we are pursuing a combination of therapies. Matthew is in an intense intervention program consisting of ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis), Speech Therapy and Occupational Therapy. He is in this program for between 6-8 hours daily. He is also on a gluten-free and casein-free diet which he has been on since February 2007. We began biomedical intervention in June 2007 as well and homeopathy in April 2008. We read stories all of the time about these parents who start the diet, biomed or other modalities and see a miracle before their eyes. We have not had that experience but with each added intervention we see improvement..... 10% here, 8% there. We know that we will reach that 100% mark and that day will be the second best day of our lives, the first being when our little angel was born! We will update this as often as possible to that you can celebrate Matthew's success with us.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Adventure City

2 comments:

Matthew Dean

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